Hi Philip, If I read correctly, the repositority [1] provides many recipes which create various Emacs VM. Cool!
Well, from my point of view, these should live in a channel. Maybe the channel guix-past is a good location. Somehow, it would be better to have a channel with binary substitutes. That's the easy part, somehow. Using one of these old Emacs VM, then the user cannot install any Emacs package via Guix -- because the Emacs packages provided by Guix are bytecompiled by the emacs-build-system using the package emacs-minimal and thus although the bytecode is "stable", there is not guarantee that it is compatible. Concretely, guix install emacs@24 emacs-foo then 'M-x foo' and who knows if it would work. The Emacs packages have to be rebuild using the correct Emacs VM -- in the example Emacs 24. >From my point of view, the best is to use packages transformations. Give a look at: https://issues.guix.gnu.org/41732 for instance, let say 'package-with-explicit-emacs' and it would ease to get one old Emacs VM and Emacs packages build with it. WDYT? This 'package-with-explicit-emacs' could be provided by Guix itself; which help for testing 'emacs-next', say. The old Emacs VM could be in a channel, say guix-past. Then, this very same transformation could be applied. Cheers, simon 1: https://git.sr.ht/~pkal/guix-emacs-historical